(The following dialogue is an edited
translation of an interview that originally appeared in the Winter
1999/2000, issue of the German journal, Zukünfte
[Futures].)

David P.
Snyder has consulted with major companies and government agencies in the
U.S. and around the world on questions about the future since the 1960's. As
a Senior Planning Officer, he previously developed a strategic planning
system for the IRS, the American tax agency. As early as the mid-1970's
Snyder proposed, in an article in the FUTURIST magazine, a social
innovation: Giving families the same rights as economic enterprises that
companies and other formal institutions have enjoyed for centuries – to
incorporate as ongoing legal entities. Since then, his ideas have attracted
several noteworthy supporters; for example, Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker of
the University of Chicago. Zukünftecorrespondent Evelyn Hauser spoke with David Pearce Snyder.

Globalization and Mass
Culture as Major Driving Forces of the Future

HAUSER: Will the new Millennium bring us
fundamental changes in society?

SNYDER: At this moment, humankind is
encountering multiple revolutionary changes, including globalization. That,
by itself, is a genuine revolution. From now on, the world economy will move
as a single system. It's never been that way before. The integration of the
global economy in the 21st Century will see the universal
adoption of Western marketplace practices, resulting in a worldwide mass
market consumer culture, extensively motivated by the mass media.

In this respect, the next century will
bring about a movement toward a global culture, and an increasingly
homogenous marketplace. By the time we get to the end of this century, there
will be just a handful of popular, well-known brand names for each major
consumer product and service in the world marketplace. Most dominant vendors
in the global mass market will come from Western economies simply because we
are the oldest mass-market economies.

There will still be regional brands that
cater to particular local tastes, especially in food and clothing style.
There will also be great commercial icons from non-Western cultures that
will expand to become dominant "global players" in the world marketplace.
For example, current evidence suggests that in the future we will see Indian
firms become major global traders in both agricultural products and in the
hospitality business.

HAUSER: So globalization will be one of
the main driving forces in the next century?

SNYDER: Absolutely. And globalization of
the economy will, in turn, lead to the emergence of a global culture:
continuously-evolving amalgamations of the music, art, and cuisine of many
nations. Moreover, modern technology is going to get very good at
replicating differing cultural settings. In ten years, three-dimensional
television will be common. In 20 years, most homes will have a so-called
"data cave," in which the entire room will be the screen. You will walk into
it and be present in the projected image. You
will be standing in the middle of a bazaar in downtown Calcutta in 1820, not
merely looking at a picture of it. You’ll see all the sights, hear all the
sounds and people talking; there even will be all the smells. We will be
able to transport ourselves into the simulated environments of different
places and times. By the end of the 21st Century, this will be
a common phenomenon.

The Struggle to Preserve Cultural
Integrity

HAUSER: This might be true for Western
industrialized countries....

SNYDER: This is going to happen
everywhere. To begin with, information technology will become so cheap, so
powerful, and so intuitively simple to use that it will be truly ubiquitous
by 2025. The kinds of sights and sounds that appeal to Westerners are not
unique to the West. Many of the physical experiences that thrill me, engage
me, draw me in, are commonly appealing to all human beings. Many local
leaders in the developing nations are upset, (with good reason) because,
once their citizens are exposed to the vivid graphic visual images of modern
Westernized daily life on the Internet, local events and culture will seem
dull, and nobody will want to watch local television or adhere to
traditional customs anymore. There is now a growing movement to preserve
local cultural integrity. Just as conservationists are trying to preserve
endangered species of animals and plants from becoming extinct, there are
groups out there – political movements, international organizations, etc. –-
trying to protect local indigenous cultures and languages from becoming
extinct. This will be a big battle in the 21st Century.

HAUSER: What do you think the outcome will
be?

SNYDER: Well, there will continue to be
sporadic attempts by nations to exclude or restrict the Internet, but all
will fail. There will also be growing numbers of cultural preserves
or enclaves,
but I believe it will be a losing battle. The appeal of global culture is
already so powerful that it will simply capture most of the young people
from every culture that becomes exposed to the audio-visual excitement and
social dynamism of Western culture. Whole generations will be sucked right
out of their traditional cultural norms and expectations. The first
generation of a local culture that modernizes will retain some of their old
lifestyles, behaviors and values, but not most of them. And two or three
generations down the road, all but the dominant local cultural forms and
icons will be gone altogether.

There will be a variety of institutional
attempts to preserve the artifacts and rituals of traditional cultures. In
Industrial nations around the world, for example, there are "Country Life"
parks recreating daily life on a farm a hundred years ago, before
electricity. There will be reservations that preserve traditional local
lifestyles, crafts, structures and tools. Ethnographers and cultural
anthropologists will enshrine them in "living museums," some of which will
become highly successful tourist destinations. But that's it. There will be
attempts to halt the homogenizing effects of modern global culture, but I
think most will fail as self-sustaining communities.

Local Tribal Cultures Will Be Gobbled Up

HAUSER: Let me exaggerate a little bit.
Does that mean that South America, Africa, parts of Asia, will be museums in
100 years from now?

SNYDER: Oh no. They will become modernized
like we are. They will have high rise cities and suburbs and highways and so
forth. As the modern secular lifestyle rolls across them, their local tribal
cultures will be largely pushed aside and then gobbled up. Modernization
will come to all parts of the world. Within a hundred years, most humans
will live in places that look like Singapore, Houston or Istanbul, which may
sound terrible to many people.

HAUSER: Does that mean you think that –-
basically –- lifestyles will become the same all over the world?

SNYDER: Yes and no. There will be a mixing
of "memes" –– what they call the equivalent of "genes" in culture. These
memes –- individual components of a cultures daily ritual or behavioral
style –- from different cultures will be mixed into the global culture and
they will enrich it. Each succeeding generation of young people in the
modern societies will increasingly be in direct contact with young people in
Zamboanga, Cairo, or Chichicastenango through the Internet. They will talk
about the things that are important to them. Within ten years electronic
instantaneous translation will mean that the children of the United States
will be able to interact with children of Central China who are speaking
Mandarin. This will break down barriers, certainly, among cultures, and it
will accelerate the degree to which we feel a kinship with people on the
other side of the world who look and sound different from us. This will do
much to reduce animosity and even, hopefully, warfare.

Manifestations of traditional cultures will
endure in those aspects of life that we commonly associate with cultural
style: music, art, clothing styles, food, manners of expression, design,
social customs, personal habits. Do you shake hands to greet some one? Do
you press your palms together or do you hug one another? These will be the
things that give us our unique identity as Amazon Indians versus being
Brazilian etc. It's just that most of the enormous disparities between
indigenous cultures of the developing nations and those of the developed
world will largely disappear, simply because billions of people will no
longer be living in distressful conditions of extreme poverty and
austerity. But artifacts of those cultures –– the common rituals and
symbols –– will remain as a part of local social style in a global
civilization; a kind of collective social-cultural statement: "This is who
we were, and it is part of who we are now." But less and less will we be
purely what we were. By the close
of the 21st Century, I believe people everywhere will take great
pride in saying: "I am a citizen of the world…., of the planet Earth."

This is not to say that there aren't many
people who are very unhappy with globalization –– and with the cultural
modernization that comes with it. There will be violent attempts to
forestall globalization –– revolution, terrorism, civil war, etc.
Simultaneously, intentional communities will emerge in societies throughout
the world that will seek to withdraw from all this –– who will try to find
places out in the desert, or up in the mountains, etc. –– where they can be
free of all this innovation and change. That's fine. There have always been
people like that and we will continue to have people like that. But these
will not be mainstream societies; there will not be whole nations like that.
There will be no Taliban regime in Afghanistan 50 years from now;
Afghanistan will be much more like Morocco or Tunisia are today. They will
still be Islamic and they may dress differently from us, but they will drive
cars, have computers and television sets and invest in stocks and bonds.
Most importantly, they will observe global standards of human rights with
respect to women and to peoples who are not from their culture.

Meanwhile, More of Us Will Commute by
Going Downstairs

HAUSER: People will still need food,
clothing, housing, healthcare, daycare, eldercare. How do you envision this
in a hundred years from now?

SNYDER: Certainly, more of us will work
out of our homes. More and more of us will commute by coming downstairs, not
only in the U.S., but worldwide. By the time we get to the end of this
century, up to half of all gainful employment in modern societies will be
done in the home. The other half of the work –– just by necessity –– will
have to be done onsite, such as road maintenance, manufacturing,
construction, law enforcement, and things like that. The important reality
here is that the home will no longer be just a social setting; it will also
be an economic enterprise as well. Until the Industrial Revolution, most
households were both social and economic enterprises. Just 100 years
ago in America, half of all the workers were home-based. Most were farmers;
others were professionals –– doctors, lawyers and, accountants, etc. –– or
artisans, like the potter, the tailor or the jeweler who lived above or
behind the shop.

Information technology and the info-mated
economy will return much productive enterprise to the household. In this
setting, children will grow up in homes where marketplace work is done,
which will give young people a much better understanding the world of work.
This will be an important side-benefit altogether. Right now, most young
people's view of work is primarily shaped by the way television depicts the
workplace. Of course, television very carefully never shows you ordinary
people actually doing ordinary work, because that's not entertaining. They
show people socializing on the job, having affairs, going through mid-life
crises, suffering accidental injuries, etc., but never working.

Farm children, by comparison, grow up
watching their parents work, and are given chores to do themselves at a very
early age. They learn the notion of work and personal responsibility, and
how work links the individual to the larger world beyond the household and
the local community. In contrast, all the typical suburban home offers its
children is a social context –– or a social-emotional context, if you will
–– and that I believe, is not an adequate introduction to the world of adult
life.

HAUSER: If more of us work at home in the
21st Century, where will we go to "play?" Some futurists say
that virtual reality and other forms of cyber–entertainment will make home
recreation so appealing that people will stop going out to movies and
concerts.

SNYDER: Well, 85% of all leisure activity
today already occurs in the home, and three activities make up almost all of
it: watching television, reading books and magazines, and socializing with
family and friends. I believe that a hundred years from now the proportion
of home-based leisure time will be very much the same. Most of our leisure
and recreation time will be spent in the home. But info-com technology will
bring a wealth of physical environments into our homes. For example, the
friends and family members with whom we socialize in 2025 will be scattered
all over the country –– or the world–-and assembled in our living rooms
through the wonders of virtual reality.

What's more, we will be able to experience
in-doors almost anything that we can experience out-of-doors, often more
quickly, more safely, and cheaper than if we went outside and actually did
it. At the same time, our ability to interact with any place in the world
through the media in our homes will also serve as the hook to lure us out of
the house to experience reality. We'll watch somebody riding a dune-buggy or
walking into the 2km-long "big Room" at Carlsbad Cavern on 3-DTV and say: "I
want to do that."

One other basic parameter that will change
over the next 100 years is that average life span will get much longer.
Average life expectancy in the modern countries will be somewhere between 85
and 95, and in the rest of the world it will certainly jump up to between 65
and 75. Now, if we look at a future where everybody will be living longer
and staying healthy until they are in their seventies or eighties, many
people will extend their active work life, have several careers in sequence,
and certainly have a more active "retirement." This will be an area of
ongoing adaptive behavior world wide throughout the 21st Century.

The Family as Social Service Institution

HAUSER: Who will take care of the people
who are not be able to sustain themselves in the course of this very long
lifetime? Will we have huge government agencies taking care of dependent
elderly people? Or will private sector insurance do it?

SNYDER: The observation that I have always
made in looking at the future of social welfare is that formal institutions
are, by and large, not very good at nurturance. On the whole, they are
bankruptingly expensive and offer indifferent care. We've got a lot of data
that says elder care facilities, even expensive ones, are often neglectful
and abusive, and that it is very difficult for formal institutions to
motivate people to be truly nurturing to strangers simply by paying them
cash money. It has been this gradually-dawning realization that is leading
us to reassess the modern family as an evolving, multi-functional enterprise
rather than simply as the nuclear social unit in which people are born and
raised.

The modern nuclear family became the
dominant form of household in Western Culture around 1900, and lost that
dominance in the mid-1970's. The family is the most adaptive institution
that we have. Larger, formal institutions resist change as something that is
inconvenient, distracting, unpredictable, and worse. Public institutions
are often unable to change without political or legislative permission.
Families, on the other hand, have no choice but to look at their
circumstances and deal with them. What's more, history suggests that the
family, if adequately empowered by law and supported by public policy, can
become not merely the principal social institution but the principal
social service institution, for modern society. Given appropriate public
policy support, the only time that a person or an individual household
should need to turn to the government for a social “safety net” would be if
their extended family –– that is, the total network of their living
relations –– were collectively unable to deal with the situation.

HAUSER: Do you see this as a plausible
scenario?

SNYDER: Absolutely! In fact, that's the
way things used to be before the industrial era. In most formal cultures in
history –– whether tribal, nomadic or mercantile—the family assumed, or was
assigned, the responsibility for social welfare. I believe that, as we move
into this increasingly prosperous, market driven global culture, there are
several reasons why the family will become the most reasonable, the most
probable, and the most desirable social support unit.

Think about it! Who are the people who
will have remained emotionally close to me during a lifetime spent in this
mass culture world; a world where we will be increasingly likely to move all
over our country and even all over the world; where we will change jobs many
times, and may not even stay in the same career path? There is almost nobody
with whom we will maintain contact over a 75-year lifetime except
members of our family. Therefore, who's going to know us best in times of
need? Who will be able to accommodate us –– even if they may not want to
accommodate us –– better than any formal state institution? Our families!

The Extendable Family

SNYDER: French sociologist Émile Durkheim
spent much of his life trying to discover an institution that would be
humane to its members and yet still survive and prosper over the long term
in an Industrial world dominated by giant private and public bureaucracies.
He looked at the industrial welfare systems being created in Europe around
1890 and was the first one to refer to social institutions as "warehouses
for people." He concluded that it would be crucial for society to create an
organization small enough to accommodate the natural diversity of humankind,
and yet still big enough to have some leverage or influence in a mass
culture. After spending his life looking –– and he studied all kinds of
things, communes, cooperative ventures, etc. –– he concluded that the most
effective social institution is the extended family. I agree with Durkheim,
that the extended family –– or as I now prefer to call it, the "extendable"
family –– should be regarded as the primary social safety net for the
post-industrial age.

HAUSER: What do you mean by that?

SNYDER: In the U.S. suburbs, there is
currently a building boom underway of "Granny flats" and "mother-in-law
wings." Instead of going into assisted living communities or elder care
facilities, a growing share of our Baby Boomers’ physically-dependent, aging
parents are moving back "next door" to their grown children. (One-third of
senior citizens surveyed by the UCLA School of Medicine say that they would
kill themselves rather than go into an elder care facility.) If we are
concerned about the quality of life of elderly people, there is one group of
people who are most likely to make a diligent effort to care for and nurture
an elderly person: their relatives. The extendable family is the naturally
occurring assisted living arrangement.

Engendering Tolerance for Human
Diversity

SNYDER: Another great benefit of the
extendable family is that it teaches you tolerance for the natural diversity
of humanity. Uncle Oscar, for example, lived with us when I was growing up.
Uncle Oscar was not entirely “all there.” He was a nice enough guy, but he
couldn’t seem to hold down a job. He had very impractical ideas about money
and propriety, and sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a stretch. Then he
would turn up again and he wouldn't seem quite well. But he was a reliable
baby sitter who had a swell relationship with all the children in the
family. Now, who is able to take better care of Uncle Oscar in his dotage
than the relatives who know and love him in spite of the fact that he's a
little weird.

It is that tolerance of human diversity
that formal institutions cannot even afford to acknowledge –– that ability
to accommodate the natural variety of "personhood" –– that makes the family
the best institution to take care of the dependent elderly members of
society. And, of course, Uncle Oscar might also be just the right person to
take care of another elderly relative with Alzheimer's perfectly; a slightly
pixilated, able-bodied episodic alcoholic in his sixties who finally finds
his role in life.

In fact, sociologists have now concluded
that the nuclear family is probably not an optimal setting in which to raise
kids. There are only two adult role models for the children to pattern on.
If those two adult role models are going through a difficult time because
one has lost his/her job, or one of them has a substance abuse problem, when
they are not fighting with each other, they are complaining about how rotten
life is, etc.

HAUSER: How do you imagine everyday life
in an extendable family?

SNYDER: By definition, the household of an
extendable family hosts multiple functions and multiple adult generations.
Typically, those multiple functions would include –– in addition to the
basic function of shelter –– gainful employment, education, social context
and convalescent or long-term care. In the freehold farmsteads of Europe
and North America, for example, it has long been common for three
generations of one family to live under one roof, or at least, on the same
property. My great grandfather and his brothers left Switzerland for
America in the 1860's not for freedom and fortune, but because, they
complained, all the houses in the village where they lived were so crowded
with live-in relatives that there was no personal space or privacy.

When they got here, my forbears found a
country where land was so plentiful and cheap that successful farm families
routinely expanded their homes or built new houses to accommodate their
adult offspring rather than squeezing the extended family into an unextended
dwelling. Perhaps the most striking examples of family self-sufficiency are
the Amish and Mennonite farmers of North America, who continue to endow each
new generation of families with their own farmsteads in the immediate
community –– i.e. a horse and buggy ride distance from where the preceding
generation live –– in anticipation that the younger generation will care for
the elder when the time comes. These traditions derive from the Sect's
strict interpretation of Christian scripture, as does their refusal to pay
social security taxes or to accept social security benefits. They are, in
fact, their own socio-economic safety net.

Of course, it is commonly argued that farm
families are uniquely able to be trans-generationally self-sufficient,
because the household itself produces marketplace value, and because the
ownership of land affords ample space for multi-generational housing. In
Europe, however, during the Mercantile Era that followed the Renaissance,
residential property in the market towns typically included two or
three dwelling structures. At the front of
the site, right on the sidewalk, was the structure that housed the family
business on the ground floor, over which the family lived. As the town, the
business, and the family grew, a second house was built, about 15 to 20
meters behind the street-front structure, into which most of the family
moved. The original dwelling space over the shop was either used for
expanded business activities, or was given to the oldest child and his/her
family as their "starter home." Finally, 20 to 30 years after the original
house and shop were built, a third structure, often referred to as the
"retirement house" was constructed at the back of the property.

Both in towns, or in the countryside, under
one roof or several, multi-generational households were the social safety
net of pre-industrial Western culture. This is not to say that there were
not endowed and religious charities; there were. But most were "means
tested," and open largely to people who had no family to care for them. For
most widows, orphans and other indigent persons, both social custom –– and
contemporary law –– assigned responsibility for care to their families. All
of this changed with the rise of industrial cities.

Industrialization reduced the family's
capacity for trans-generational self-sufficiency in two ways. First, it
shifted the physical location of most marketplace work out of households and
into factories, mines and mills. And then, because industrial production
required unprecedented concentrations of labor, industrial residential
arrangements –– dormatories, tenements and terrace housing, etc. –– placed
families in small, densely-packed unexpandable dwelling spaces that simply
could not accommodate extended households. During the ensuing
century-and-a-half, the industrial economy compensated workers and their
families for the loss of their natural social safety net by hugely
increasing compensation for the bulk of the workers, and by creating formal
institutions to replace the extended household, such as pensions, health and
accident insurance, social security, savings banks and assisted living
centers.

Whether or not we were entirely happy with
the trade-offs we made, by the 1950's and 60's, the institutional social
safety nets in most mature industrial economies began to work for most
people. But today, now that hundreds of millions of people in Europe and
North America have come to rely upon formal institutions for their social
services and economic security, those institutions are being dismantled,
scaled back, and subjected to marketplace forces. Our Industrial Era social
technologies are now out-dated. Like the vertically-integrated corporate
conglomerate and the hierarchical, pyramidal bureaucracy, our industrial era
public schools, healthcare and social welfare programs are past their
economically-efficient service lives. They will have to be re-invented for
the Information Age.

As mature industrial economies pass over
the threshold from labor-intensive to information-intensive work, they will
eventually invent new social technologies suitable to our new
techno-economic realities. But during the turbulent, transformational
decade or two ahead, it is only reasonable that, with the shrinkage of the
Industrial Era social safety nets, people are turning, once again, to
society's natural safety net, the extendable family. And, strikingly, the
individual household's capacity to extend itself has become much greater
than it was just a generation ago. In 1970, income-producing work took
place in fewer than 10% of all U.S. households; today, gainful employment
occurs in over 40% of U.S. households. (You may not be able to mass-produce
automobiles or appliances in your home, but you can
produce valuable information products and services!)

Moreover, 70% of North American households
now live in suburbs, where average lot size is similar to that of Europe's
Mercantile Era towns. As a consequence, there is an ongoing boom in home
expansions –– e.g. office additions, granny flats and in-law wings, etc. In
the U.S., while 1.5 million elderly live in nursing homes, nearly 10 times
that many live with relatives. The trans-generational, extendable family is
back; it's alive and well, and I believe, capable of making society much
less dependent upon large, formal institutions and their de-humanizing,
rule-based, one-size-fits-all services.

So, in response to your original question,
everyday life in a 21st Century extendable household will be very
much like everyday life in the extended households of 16th
Century mercantile Europe, or 19th Century rural America. It
will be home to 2, 3 or even 4 generations, and a variety of commercial
enterprises. Unlike the typical 20th Century suburban home,
which frequently stood empty most of the day while it's occupants went off
to work, day care and school, the 21st Century extendable
household is likely to be occupied and active from sun-up to late at night.

Other Appropriate Social Technologies

HAUSER: Isn't this something exclusively
for rich countries? Aren't other solutions necessary for less well-to-do
people and nations?

SNYDER: First of all, let’s be clear that
most long-range forecasts today project not only growing prosperity for
essentially all the world’s people, but a dramatic closing in the economic
gap between the highest income households and the lowest, both within
nations and among them. Today, the ratio between the average incomes
of the wealthiest nations and the poorest is about 30 to 1. By the end of
the 21st Century, this is expected to be about 6 to 1. What’s
more, the great majority of middle-income households created during the next
100 years will be in what we currently regard as “developing” nations in
Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Given humankind’s great potential for
progress as we enter the 21st Century, we should not casually
assume the continued predominance of the massive poverty that currently
characterizes many of the world’s nations. It is much more purposeful, I
believe, for us to begin exploring how we can sustain the consumption rates
characteristically associated with our soaring levels of prosperity without
exhausting our natural resources and destroying our environment. Clearly we
will need more efficient physical and social technologies in the 21st
Century than we were able to devise during the Industrial Era.

Group Houses

SNYDER: For example, in the U.S., we have
something we call "group houses" or "affinity" houses. They are
naturally-occurring, non-familial, multi-member households. They exist all
over America, in cities, suburbs and in rural areas. One of the fastest
growing types of “group house” involves mature single women. Because men
die five to ten years earlier than women, there are a lot of widows living
alone out there. They are still healthy and they want to live where all
their friends are–and their parish churches. But they don’t want to live
alone in a large suburban house.

One strategy of these older single women is
to build accessory apartments in their homes and rent them out. The tenant
then becomes their live-in handyman (handy-person). That's a growing
phenomenon in the U.S. Another is for three to six widows to get together.
Very often, they will have known each other for years. They will buy a large
single-family home in a suburb where most of them have lived all their adult
lives, and establish a “family” of a half-dozen elderly women living
together in the same house. They live together like a family, their
behavior is like a family's—they eat most meals together, share household
chores, etc.

Since the 1970's, U.S. courts have ruled
that these arrangements are legal, and not excludable by local residential
zoning codes. This has paved the way for the spontaneous establishment of
thousands of group houses across America, for non-elderly, largely as homes
for groups of 4 to 8 single young adults, often sharing some common affinity
–– e.g. all law students, programmers, nurses, etc. Group houses are a
naturally-evolving social technology in a growing number of developed
nations today.

Co-housing

Europe's contribution to the ongoing
evolution of domestic enterprise is "co-housing," invented in Denmark in the
early 1970's, by a group of 27 families seeking to re-create the mutual
support functions of a traditional village in an urban neighborhood. In a
co-housing community, each family has its own home, but the households also
share common-use facilities, including child and elder care, a business
center, frozen food locker, community kitchen and dining/party/meeting room,
gymnasium/swimming pool/playing field, work shop, vacation property, etc.
The concept has gained currency in Sweden and the Netherlands and in the
U.S. where numerous co-housing communities, serving from 8 to 30 families
each, are scattered across one-third of the States.

When surveyed, members of co-housing
communities consistently report that they are enormously pleased with their
choice of living arrangements. Given their high satisfaction ratings, it is
worth noting that fewer than 200 co-housing communities have been created in
the U.S. during the past 30 years. The great problem with co-housing is
that you must pre-establish a community of 10 to 30 compatible households
who are willing to commit $100,000 to $300,000 each –- in advance –– to
acquire the property and build the community to a design on which all
parties agree. According to the leaders of the movement, it typically takes
between 5 to 10 years to actually assemble the members of a co-housing
community, (although the Internet should speed the process considerably).

In the mass-culture societies where most of
us will live and work by the mid-21st Century, people will seek
to insulate themselves –– buffer themselves –– from the risks and
uncertainties of life in a rapidly changing, de-regulated, free trade, free
market world. A generation from now, once nations have largely assimilated
these multi-fold changes, it is reasonable to expect that countries around
the world will begin to invent new social technologies –– new formal
institutions –– to deal with the system dysfunctions and unintended
side-effects of our mature, info-mated, globalized, free market economies.
But until that time, most individuals and nuclear families will need to
depend more upon smaller, less formal, more flexible social technologies.
History records an array of such social inventions –– for example, the
"beguines" and secular monasteries of 14th Century Northern
Europe. But the extended family has, throughout history, served as the
"natural" social safety net when formal institutions have failed.

In short, I am confident that, in the
decades ahead, wherever there is growing prosperity combined with personal
freedom and marketplace choice, societies around the world will engage in an
efflorescence of adaptive, innovative living and working arrangements to
exploit the opportunities and imperatives posed by their changing
circumstances. In particular, the info-mation revolution will place so much
productive capacity at the disposal of individuals, households and dispersed
families that the principal choice for the provision of almost every form of
human service –– e.g., convalescent care, education, income security,
housing, etc. –– will increasingly be between formal institutions and
technologically empowered, self-reliant, multi-generational families.

HAUSER: Provided that the whole world
would develop according to this model, do you think that there will still be
poor people 100 years from now?

SNYDER: Of course. The purposeful
question to ask is, "How many poor people will there be 100 years from
now?" And that is one of those questions that is very difficult to answer
because poverty has so many different causes: e.g., political,
environmental, cultural, etc. If current U.N. projections are correct,
fertility rates will continue to fall so that we eventually reach a stable
global population of about 10 billion people around 2080 or so. From that
point on, reducing world poverty will become much easier, since we have
every reason to believe that the global economy will continue to grow beyond
that date, and further, that we will be able to ameliorate the environmental
consequences of our prosperity.

As long as the world's population is
growing faster than we are able to raise capital, food and housing to
accommodate that growth, poverty is going to be a problem. But if general
levels of prosperity continue to rise at current rates, and the world
continues to move toward a stable population at current rates, then, surely,
we should be able to overcome most poverty by the end of this century.

Evelyn Hauser is an independent writer and researcher specializing in
cyberculture, emerging lifestyles and social change. Teleworking from
Northern California, she is also part of a virtual network of European
futurists and a professional member of the World Future Society. Her e-mail
address is ehausersf@aol.com.